According to estimates from an August eMarketer report, mobile advertising is a $16.7B market but represents just 14% of the total $117.6B digital ad spend. Despite market opportunity and years of "this is the year of mobile," mobile media buyers have struggled to manage campaigns given the voluminous variety of players and their incompatibilities.

As smart phones and tablets consume more and more audience time, ad spend will (we are told) further shift into mobile. One new company, LiquidM, aims to make things easier for the mobile advertising space with its whitelabeled product offering.

The new iOS 7 release presents an opportunity for your branded app to leap frog the competition and steal market share unlike any other iOS update in the operating system's history. Apple will be seeking to feature applications that are designed specifically for iOS 7 and users will want to use applications designed with the new UI/UX rather than the older iOS6 look and feel.

This presents an opportunity for brands to capitalize on these factors by being first to market and gaining market share against the competition. This white paper will provide an overview of the key changes that come with iOS7 upgrade, and how to best take advantage of them with your mobile apps.

Mobile marketing. We've been talking about it for years, right? And debating when it will arrive. Or the fact that it already has. To keep the debate churning, we've got a boatload of stats -- and and infographic as well -- to keep you knee deep in the debate over whether or not mobile has finally arrived.

In 2011, mobile marketing became a $14 billion industry. By 2015, retailers and marketers will spend $19.8 billion on mobile marketing, up from $6.7 billion in 2012.In 2016, that number will hit $22 billion.

By the end of 2013, 15% of all online retail sales will have been made through mobile devices with mobile commerce hitting $39 billion.

Did you know that 75% of the companies do not optimize email for mobiles yet? With 43% of the people now reading and responding emails through mobiles -- a figure that is expected to hit 50% in 2013 -- coupled with the fact 97% of the people view emails once, it becomes clear marketers should design emails to render properly on mobile devices.

Check out this infographic that's packed with charts and graphs that share how mobile is permeating the email experience.

Hey this is pretty cool! Nissan, reportedly, is the first car company to come out with self-healing paint that aims to make a car scratch-proof. To tout this awesomeness, TBWA\G1 Paris, in partnership with Dan Paris and OMD Europe created an awesome iPad ad that catches people's attention in an interesting fashion and, at the same time, clearly delivers the product benefit.

Here's an interesting addition to the "brands make products" trend. Audi, with help from DDB Spain is out with a mobile Android app called Start-Stop that mimics one of the features in new Audi vehicles; smart technology turns off the engine when not in use (at a stop light, etc.) and turns it back on when needed so that energy is saved.

The app monitors which apps have been running the longest in the background and sends an alert to remind the user to quit the app, thus saving valuable battery life.

It's a perfect tie in with the brand and a practical and useful product all in one.

This guest post is written by Aquent Director of Global Marketing Katja Wald

Mobile devices have changed the way consumers interact with companies. Consumers are now accessing websites on the go, liking an organization's Facebook page and clicking on ads that interest them in certain applications. With consumers adopting mobile technology at a rapid pace, companies are eager to capitalize on this mobile explosion.

In fact, based on survey results from the Google Analytics Blog, 87 percent of marketers are planning to increase their mobile efforts in 2013. Now the questions become: what are the major challenges marketers face with utilizing mobile for marketing campaigns and how do they tackle those obstacles to successfully growing mobile as part of the overall marketing program?

U.S. businesses spend more than $300 billion on advertising each year, but only about 15% of that is spent on online advertising. The other quarter trillion dollars is spent each year not to drive a click but to drive a store visit or a phone call - tens of billions of phone calls each year from U.S. consumers to businesses. And that number is growing by billions of calls each year due to the growth of mobile search and the ubiquity of mobile phones, which results in consumers being connected wherever they are.

These developments have increased the importance of call marketing for advertisers. So, for businesses that talk to their customers on the phone, call tracking is now an essential capability. It allows marketers to properly attribute calls and marketing campaigns to a lead source, providing essential business intelligence.

Your customers all have mobile devices. Most walk around with Androids and iPhones. You have built your killer application, but your customers do not download it, and when they do, they do not use it. So how can you best engage your customers in the mobile channel?

Directly. SMS remains the best medium marketers use today to reach customers. But too many use SMS as an ax and not a scalpel. Marketers are flooding their customers: SMS traffic will approach 10 trillion messages this year, thanks mostly to SMS campaigns.

These fences create zones that trigger an SMS message or other action when a customer enters or leaves. It is called geofencing, it is new in mobile marketing, and there are some important secrets to getting right.

Here's an ingenious idea. Now that the internet is available almost anywhere, people are able to do "instant research" to learn about anything on their smart devices. For a fictional project, Miami Ad School students Max Pilwat, Keri Tan and Ferdi Rodriguez developed subway campaign that allows people to grab the first ten pages of a book while riding the subway using near field communications. Once finished they will be informed of the closest libraries so they could finish their story.